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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Is the total useful lifetime more than MacBooks with non serviceable components? I see people around me easily using Airs for 5+ years.

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Yes, but that's the slow-boiled frog syndrome. I use my computers for years as well, and whenever I get a new one I think "wow, why didn't I switch sooner, this is so much snappier".

As a counterpoint, I have a 2015 MacBook, a 2015 iMac, and a recent Apple Silicon MacBook. Of course I do Photoshop, Lightroom, Generative AI, etc. on the Apple Silicon system. But I basically don't care which system I browse the web with and, in fact, the iMac is my usual for video calls and a great deal of my web document creation and the like.

I suspect that people who have somewhat older Macs (obviously there's some limit) who find their web browsing intolerably slow probably have something else going on with either their install or their network.

>I do Generative AI,

This makes me call into question literally everything else in your post.

You might be able to do CPU based for a few trials for fun, but you arent running LLMs on CPU on a daily basis.

I do some local image generation now and then (mostly using Photoshop). Are you happy now? My only point was that any CPU/GPU-intensive applications I run (and really most local applications) I do on my newish computer. But most stuff I run is in a browser.

The relatively little LLM use I do is in a browser and it doesn't matter which computer I'm doing it on.

I’ve been a Mac user since 2003 or so and I can confidently say my machines last 6-7 years as daily drivers then sunset over 2-3 years when I get a new computer. I always go tower, laptop, tower, laptop. They have a nice overlap for a few years that serves me well.

My MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2014) is my only computer. I still don't feel like changing it so far...

Amateur… I am using a 2009 15’ MacBook Pro Unibody, with a swapped SuperDrive to SSD, another main SSD and RAM boosted to 8Gb. OpenCore Legacy to update to a relatively recent version of MacOS. The only thing that is so annoying is the webcam that doesn’t work anymore, and a USB port is dead also.

So sad this kind of shenanigans are not possible anymore.

Pfah, showoff. My 2005 Thinkpad T42p crawls circles around that thing - slowly. Maxed out to 2GB, Intel 120GB SSD with a PATA->SATA adapter (just fits if you remove some useless bits from the lid) and - what keeps this machine around - a glorious keyboard and 1600x1200 display. It even gets several hours on the battery so what more could you want?

Mmh… I see that we definitely have people of good taste around here.

I have one of these with a MacBook Pro 6,2 that I did the same upgrades to. However I finally decided to retire it when 2nd replacement battery swelled and Chrome stopped supporting OSX 13.

It didn't look like a good candidate for OpenCore Legacy because of the dual video cards, but it feels so gross recycling a perfectly working computer.

I run the one from 2011 (16 Gb of ram though) and it runs highly minimalistic Arch Linux. So far so good.

My air isnt that old, and I'm eyeing a new one...

I find that a lot of my work is "remote" at this point. Im doing most things on Servers, VM's, and containers on other boxes. The few apps that I do run locally are suffering (browser being the big offender).

Is most of what you're doing remote? Do you have a decent amount of ram in that air?

no, most of the work i do is local, but it's fairly easy stuff, some statistical software, excel, word, browser. And my browser is not suffering that much, perhaps because i have 8GB of ram, and i visit simple websites. Using an adblocker is fundamental tho.

i have an Air from 2011 or 2012 that is out of storage with just the OS installed. I can't update or install any other software because the most recent update installed on it capped out the storage. Low-end windows laptops (the $150-$300 at walmart type) have this same issue. 32GB of storage and windows takes 80% of the space, and you can no longer fit a windows update on it.

I still have the air with whatever the macos is, but as soon as i have a minute i'm going to try and get linux or BSD on it. I'm still sore at how little use i got out of that machine - and i got it "open box" "scratch and dent", so it was around $500 with tax. I got triple the usage out of a 2009ish eeePC (netbook)

You could try ChromeOS Flex on it?

The main thing that convinced me to get on the ARM macs is the heat and battery life(which kind of go together). It's never uncomfortable on the lap.

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